This paper analyzes the relationship between loss, collecting, and memory in two institutional settings in Turkey: The Turkish Seed Gene Bank (TSGB), Turkey’s first central, national plant conservation institution that opened in 2010, and The Museum of Innocence, established in 2012, four years after the publication of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s eponymous international bestseller. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the TSGB, the paper first demonstrates how the TSGB was founded upon a historical understanding of loss of land, sovereignty, and national biowealth, and how through mundane memory practices intrinsic to conservation, conservationists retraced, remembered, and reshaped such historical narratives in the course of their everyday work. The paper then shows that such remembrances at the TSGB culminated in narratives of loss that amounted to a sort of self-knowledge, a creative situating of oneself in Turkish history. Built less than two years after and 300 miles apart from the TSGB, the Museum of Innocence can be seen as a living argument for the relationship between loss, collection, and memory, as well as an exhibit of Turkish material culture in the second half of the 20th century. Home to objects that supposedly belong to the eponymous novel’s protagonist Kemal’s beloved, Füsun, the museum is a first in Turkey in its blending of fact and fiction, and its explicit problematization of this divide through its exploration of the work of memory. Infused with the soul of the moments in which they intersected with the characters’ lives in the novel, the displayed objects in the museum lie in their cases as tokens of memory and intimacy, as well as material constituents of personal and socio-cultural histories. Juxtaposing the collection and conservation practices in Pamuk’s novel and museum with those at the TSGB, this paper analyzes the cultural underpinnings of collecting in modern Turkey. By paying particular attention to the historical narratives of loss tied memory practices at the TSGB and Pamuk’s depiction of the guilt and the pride of the collector in his novel, it examines the role that historicity plays in the organization, legitimization, and narrativization of institutional collection and conservation practices in Turkey.